Wow, THAT took a lot longer than i expected!


The original idea for the four EPs was to have them out in around 2 years, which meant one roughly every six months. Well, just over twelve months on and we've just release the second EP! oh well, that'll teach me for putting a timeframe on music, so now all i'm gonna say is that they'll be ready when they're ready (that way i'm covered).

But, now that 'Watch It Burn' is finally out, i'm really happy with the result and the way it all came together, and its great to have picked up some fans along the way since releasing 'Faceless'! It's always awesome to be able to have fun writing music, but it's really fucken cool to know that people appreciate our music for what it is.

There were a number of reasons for the delay, not the least of which was that i kept having ideas for bonus tracks! One song that held things up a fair bit was 'Water On The Sun', which i had originally intended to put on 'Faceless' but couldn't get the lyrics/vocals together in time. Once we'd finished 'Faceless' i started back on that song but still couldn't get anything that i liked, so we continued on with the other songs, re-visiting 'Water On The Sun' each time one of the others was looking finished. Eventually it ended up that all the other songs were done, but this one still remained - i had some decent ideas down, but it was just one of those songs i guess. Eventually i had something that i really liked and as a result it has turned out to be one of our more 'epic' sounding songs with multiple weird time signatures along with brass and strings over top of big riffs.

Whilst recording 'Watch It Burn', we added an extra addition to the growing list of bassists that have been involved with Shift. I used to jam with Dean when i was in high-school so it was great to have him make a trip to Melbourne just to jam, after not having seen him for many, many years. He was able to lay down a couple tracks and no doubt he'll be doing a couple more for the next EP alongside Duncan and Stewie. As a further result of this jam we decided to put together a different project, which we've already started working on in-between Shift stuff - at the moment it's kinda sounding a bit like Slayer vs Isis vs High On Fire so it should be interesting to see what comes of that! (i'll let ya know)

All of us who play in Shift are aware of the massive impact our influences have had on us and we've all jammed on plenty of Sepultura, Deicide, Slayer, Metallica, Megadeth, Soundgarden etc. etc. songs and riffs in the past, so it was natural to want to do a cover track for part of the bonus content. We chose to do 'In My World' by Anthrax because we felt we could put our own spin on it and not many bands(as far as i know) have covered Anthrax songs. As a guitarist i have a new found respect for Scott Ians palm-muting ability - my fore-arms were hurting after recording this song!! but it was great fun to play. Hopefully we've paid our repects and given the song a new lease of life! The other reason it was a lot of fun to do this song (again, as a guitarist) is that i don't tend to do many guitar solos in the songs i write - at least not faster ones anyway, i've just never seemed compelled to try and fit them into a song, but it was great to attempt a bit of a shred-style solo for a change.

The second cover on the EP is by XTC. I was introduced to the song 'Dear God' after Nigel gave me a copy of Misery Loves Co.'s 'Not Like Them', which had a cover of XTCs 'Complicated Game' on it. I loved the song, so i checked out XTC and they also had a song called 'Dear God' which i liked even more! I thought it might be a great idea to cover it some time down the track and put it on the ever growing list of possible covers that we'd like to try. What convinced me to bring it forward was a late night discussion with a good friend of mine about God and Christianity, him being Christian and me being an Atheist and Anti-theist. I actually enjoy those types of discussions, but i also find them incredibly frustrating at times, so 'Dear God' gave me a good outlet. Just like 'In My World', we've tried to do the song 'our way', rather than just playing things note for note.

As for the future, well, we've been asked about live shows, and yes, that's still on the horizon, and we're getting itchy to play some of this shit live! but with Kori being incapacitated due to a shoulder injury (surgery snaps are on our facebook page, but they aren't as macabre as we had hoped!), it'll still be a few months, at the very least, before we're thinking about playing live. In the meantime, we're already beginning to think about the song inclusions for the next Shift EP

Cheers for all the support, it's been awesome

- Rob \m/